#ReshootingJohnHinde: A call to arms (or at least to shutters)

Come and join the the fun of charting continuity and change across Ireland (at least as seen from the Tourists’ Gaze)

On my travels around Ireland in search of Dark Tourism sites I’ve been taking a number of old guide books with me to see how nineteenth and twentieth-century writers saw the country (Thackeray, O’Connor and Doyle are my favourite at the moment!). The books don’t deal with Dark Tourism, but I’ve been using travel guides as part of my research for years so this is a great chance to make practical use of them.

I was missing some visuals though so I added postcards to the mix and decided to challenge myself to try to reproduce postcards that resembled the iconic John Hinde postcards of Ireland. I mentioned this little project on twitter and was surprised by the enthusiastic reaction it got.

Along with the marvelous Caroline McGee ((@CarolineMcGee) and with encouragement from lots of folk including @johnhindeprints and @johnhindeimages) Google maps wouldn’t let us show the images as we wanted them, but thanks to the power of Twitter and the genius of Ronan O’Driscoll (@ronanodriscoll) we now have a wonderful functioning map.

If you click on one of the markers you’ll see the ‘then’ and ‘now’ images:

However, over the summer we’ll be adding lots more photos from our jaunts around Ireland, but it would be great to crowdsource the photos and open it to anyone who is interested so that we would have an open access resource of ‘Ireland: Then & Now’.

It’s easy to get involved. Have a look at the John Hinde archive for classic postcards views of Ireland, then take your own picture of the same and post both using #reshootingjohnhinde as the hashtag. I’ll pick it up from there and add it to the map. I’ll assume if you use the ‘reshootingjohnhinde’ hashtag that you’ve given me permission to put your image on the map – I’ll put your name on the image too.

To put the old/new photos together the best app I’ve found for this is Moldiv (which is free). Use the ‘stitch’ option and it will fit both images together without losing any part of either picture. It should look something like this:

Clock Tower, Waterford. Top – June 2018, Bottom – John Hinde Postcard

How to get involved?

Well, that’s very simple. Have a look at the John Hinde archive for classic postcards views of Ireland, then take your own picture of the same and post both using #ReshootingJohnHinde as the hashtag. I’ll pick it up from there and add it to the map. I’ll assume if you use the ‘ReshootingJohnHinde’ hashtag that you’ve given me permission to put your image on the map – I’ll put your name on the image too.

Hopefully, by the close of the summer we’ll have a real sense of what tourists several decades ago thought worthy of spending money on to keep as souvenirs or send to friends and family as a marker of their holiday. It will be fascinating to see if those same sites and sights would be captured by tourists of today and dispatched around the world via twitter, facebook, snapchat, instagram (or indeed by post!)